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Friday, July 21, 2006

The extravagant claims of madmen

On various occasions I have written about "literary madmen," but they are not merely a fixation of mine. I find that reflecting upon outlandish theories that were taken seriously for a long time teaches one to distrust many ideas that are accorded full credence in the media, and even in some scientific circles.

I remember first reading about and being fascinated by the concave hollow Earth theory in Omni magazine. Martin Gardner has discussed it elsewhere. From Wikipedia:

Martin Gardner notes that "most mathematicians believe that an inside-out universe, with properly adjusted physical laws, is empirically irrefutable". However, Gardner rejects the concave hollow Earth theory, not as disproven, but instead entirely on the basis of Occam's Razor.

4 comments:

rachel
said...

I once played a mad scientist/villian in an RPG whose grand insane scheme involved "unzipping" the (hollow) earth along the mid-Atlantic rift, and then turning the world inside out so the Subterraneans would get a turn at being the dominant people.

We live in the egg,We have covered the inide wallof the shell with dirty drawingsand the Christian names of our enemies.We are being hatched.

Whoever is hatching usis hatching our pencils as well.Set free from the egg one dayat once we shall draw a pictureof whoever is hatching us.

We assume that we're being hatched We imagine some good-natured fowland write school essaysabout the colour and breedof the hen that is hatching us.

When shall we break the shell?Our prophets inside the eggfor a middling salary argueablout the period of incubation.They posit a day called X.

Out of boredom and genuine needwe have invented incubators.We are much concerned about our offspring inside the egg.We should be glad to recommend our patentto her who looks after us.

But we have a roof over our head.Senile chicks,polyglot embryoschatter all dayand even discuss their dreams.

And what if we're not being hatched?If this shell will never break?If our horizzon is only thatof our scribbles, and always will be?We hope that we're being hatched.

Even if we only talk of hatchingthere remains the fear that someoneoutside our shell will feel hungryand crack us into the frying pan with a pinch of salt.--What shall we do then, my brethren inside the egg?----Gunter Grass

When I was a teenager I was engrossed for a while by the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan. One series of his novels involved a land inside the center of the Earth, called Pellucidar, and about the many primitive inhabitants of this land. In one of the books, even Tarzan went there. I don't think I've ever again been as fascinated by any series of books as I have been by the novels of Burroughs' I read when I was so young and innocent.